Nobody on the Left needs to pretend Nidal Hasan is anything but a murderer. He killed 13 people and wounded 32 more at Fort Hood, shooting unarmed soldiers who were waiting for routine medical processing before deployment. Grief for them is not up for debate. What is up for debate is what a government does when it kills in our name, and whether it should be allowed to turn that killing into content.
The Pentagon plans to livestream the Dec. 3 firing squad. That is not justice. It is a production decision.
Consider who is flinching. The Vatican calls the broadcast unacceptable. Pope Leo XIV calls capital punishment itself inadmissible, because modern prisons can protect the public without foreclosing redemption. Archbishop Coakley wants officials to reconsider. Most telling, Vice President Vance says he won't watch and wonders aloud whether the stream will even happen. The president endorses the firing squad but goes quiet on the camera. When the people ordering a spectacle won't say they'll attend it, they already know what it is.
The Right has built a political identity around the claim that it defends moral seriousness against a decadent culture. Yet this is the culture of the reaction video, brought to the machinery of death. A state that broadcasts an execution is not deterring anyone. Hasan is a man who framed his attack as holy war and went to trial wanting to be seen as a participant in something larger. Handing him a global audience for his last act is the kind of gift extremist recruiters dream of. If the goal is to deny him meaning, a livestream is a strange way to do it.
There is also a plain question of honesty. The government that now stages this display spent years refusing to call the Fort Hood attack what it was. The Pentagon classified it as workplace violence, which meant the wounded and the families of the dead were denied the Purple Heart and the benefits that came with it, until Congress forced the issue in 2015. Survivors fought for years for recognition and care. Now the institution that stonewalled them wants to offer a televised killing as closure. Closure is not a firing squad. It is medical care, benefits, and a government that doesn't make you beg. Spectacle is cheap, and it lets the powerful feel they've done something.
The execution itself is the first by the U.S. military since 1961. For more than six decades, through wars and atrocities, the armed forces concluded that this power was too grave to use. Reviving it with a camera attached is an announcement: restraint is for the weak, and the state's most irreversible act is now a media event.
Democrats should say this clearly and without hedging, and not just leave it to the Pope. Too many in my own party treat any objection to a notorious killer's execution as political suicide, so they mumble something about process and change the subject. That is cowardice. You can mourn the victims, want Hasan locked away until he dies, and still refuse to let the government treat killing as theater. The death penalty's defenders always claim it is solemn, a grave duty undertaken with reluctance. A livestream demolishes that claim. Solemn things don't need an audience.
If this goes forward, the question is not whether Hasan deserves punishment. He does. The question is what kind of country sells the sight of a state killing to the public, and what the next broadcast will cost us.
